*; 



U K. J\. 



IN HONOR OF 



WILLI a: 



1 






WIL 



LJA1\ 



ilRHlti^ I i*u< 



iiiiii 







SMITHSONIAN DEPOSIT 



Colonel ISaaiiam ^rescott. 



COMMEMORATIVE SERVICE. 



ORATION 



IN HONOR OF 



COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT 



DELIVERED IN BOSTON, 14 OCTOBER, 1895 



BY INVITATION OF THE 



l^mmt Hill Monument association 



BY 



WILLIAM EVERETT 



BOSTON 

PUBLISHED BY THE ASSOCIATION 

1896 






Trfff 



r 



'UL 18 1896 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 







I 



PREFACE. 



At a meeting of the Standing Committee of the 
Bunker Hill Monument Association, held on the 
twenty-ninth of July, 1895, — 

The President stated that Colonel William Pres- 
COTT died on the thirteenth of October, 1795, and that 
it had been suggested that the Association should hold 
a Memorial Service to commemorate the Centennial 
of that event. It was — 

Voted, To hold a Service October 14th, 1895, in commemo- 
ration of the Life and Public Services of Colonel William 
Prescott, and that an invitation be extended to Hon. William 
Everett to deliver an Oration on the occasion. 

It was also voted that a Committee of Arrangements 
should be appointed by the President, who selected the 
following named gentlemen : Mr. Henry H. Edes, Dr. 
Benjamin Apthorp Gould, Dr. J. Collins Warren, 
the Hon. George S. Hale, Col. Arnold A. Rand, the 
Rev. Edward G. Porter, and Mr. Henry E. Woods. 

The Commemorative Service was held in Dr. Hale's 
Church on the evening of Monday, the fourteenth of 
October. In the pulpit, which was decorated with 



6 PREFACE. 

flags and tropical plants, beside Dr. Everett, sat the 
Hon. Frederic W. Lincoln, the President of the Asso- 
ciation ; Charles Francis Adams, LL.D., President of 
the Massachusetts Historical Society ; Benjamin Ap- 
THORP Gould, LL.D., President of The Colonial Society 
of Massachusetts; Mr. Abner Cheney Goodell, Jr., 
Vice-President of the Essex Institute ; the Hon. Wins- 
low Warren, President of the Massachusetts Society 
of the Cincinnati ; the Rev. Dr. Joseph Henry Allen, 
the Rev. Dr. Edward Everett Hale, and Mr. Henry 
Herbert Edes. 

A large and distinguished audience was in atten- 
dance, including delegations from many of the patriotic 
organizations designed to perpetuate the memory of 
the men who served faithfully and well the American 
Colonies, Provinces, and States, — as well at the Coun- 
cil Board as in the field. Prominent among these 
were the Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames 
of America, the Warren and Prescott Chapter of the 
Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Massa- 
chusetts Commandery of the Military Order of the 
Loyal Legion of the United States. In the unavoid- 
able absence of the Governor of the Commonwealth, 
His Honor, Roger Wolcott, the Lieutenant-Governor, 
was present with a delegation from the Governor's 
Staff. The Prescott family, with which the Lieuten- 
ant-Governor is allied by marriage, was largely repre- 
sented ; and the same may be said of the Federal and 



PREFACE. 



State Bench and Bar, of the other learned professions, 
of Science and the Arts, and of Commerce. 

Letters of regret were received from many gentle- 
men whose public engagements precluded their at- 
tendance. Some of these letters will be found on 
subsequent pages. 

The Exercises proceeded in accordance with the 
Programme printed on pp. 13-15, post 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Page 

Form of Invitation 10 

Order of Exercises 13 

Introductory Remarks, by Mr. Henry H. Edes . 17 

Invocation, by Dr. Joseph H. Allen ..... 21 

Oration, by the Hon. William Everett .... 23 

Letters of Regret 61 



FORM OF INVITATION =^^ 



WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

Born 20 February, 1726 . . . Died 13 October, 1795. 



^HE BUNKER HILL MONUMENT ASSOCIA- 
TION invites you to be present at a Service in 
commemoration of 

CoL WliUiam ^restott. 

who commanded the American forces in the redoubt 
at Bunker Hill, to be held in the South Congregational 
Meeting-House, corner of Exeter and Newbury Streets, 
Boston, on Monday Evening, 14th instant, at 8 o'clock. 

An Oration will- be delivered by the Honorable 
William Everett, LL.D. 

In furtherance of the purpose of the Association 
to make this a patriotic and distinctively American 
occasion, in the highest and best sense, invitations have 
been sent to the officers of The Society of the Cincin- 
nati, The Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 



The Massachusetts Commandery of the Military Order 
of the Loyal Legion of the United States, and other 
associations of a kindred nature. All members of such 
societies who may be present are respectfully requested 
to wear their Insignia. 

Upon your acceptance of this invitation a ticket of 
admission will be sent to you. 

A reply is respectfully requested by or before Thurs- 
day, loth instant. 

HENRY H. EDES, 
BENJAMIN A. GOULD, 
J. COLLINS WARREN, 
GEORGE S. HALE, 
ARNOLD A. RAND, 
EDWARD G. PORTER, 
HENRY E. WOODS, 

Committee of Arrangements. 

Boston, 5 October, 1895. 




ORDER OF EXERCISES ^^ 



BUNKER HILL MONUMENT ASSOCIATION. 



Commemotatibe ^erWce 



IN HONOR OF 



COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT, 

In the South Congregational Meeiing-Hotise, 
Boston, 

14 October, 1895. 



WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 



Born 20 February, 1726 . . . Died 13 October, 1795. 



(2^rlier of Cyerctses* 



PRELUDE BY THE ORCHESTRA. 



ORGAN VOLUNTARY. 



ANTHEM. 



INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 

By Mr. Henry H. Edes, 

Chairman of the Committee of Arrangements- 



INVOCATION 
By The Reverend Joseph H. Allen, D.D. 



BALLAD OF BUNKER HILL. 
By George Lunt. 



Fast fled morn's shadows gray, 
And with the breaking day 

Our hearts grew still ; 
But ere that ruddy beam 
Tinged Mystic's silent stream, 
Flashed the red cannon's gleam 

By Bunker Hill. 

Morn saw our rampart crowned, 
Nor pierced our turf-clad mound 

Their iron storm ; 
Then ceased that fiery shower ; 
Gathered the foe his power; 
Welcome the desperate hour — 

His squadrons form ! 



We from our fort's low crest, 
Our muskets down at rest, 

Glance in a row; 
There, not a drum-beat stirred, 
But " Steady ! "—all we heard — 
" Keep your fire, wait the word, 

Then, boys, aim low ! " 

They form — brief space they 

grant — 
Not one rebuff must daunt 

Stout English hearts ; 
Quick-step their columns tread, 
Pigott, none nobler led. 
And Howe is at their head — 

They '11 play their parts. 



Away the war-cloud rolled; 
Prescott, our captain bold, 

True soldier known — 
He cried — " One more brave 

blow, 
Once more repel the foe. 
And England's King shall grow 

Pale on his throne ! " 

Oh, for one volley more ! 

Ah, dear-spent flasks, your store 

Fails at the worst ! 
See, o'er the bastion's verge 
Their furious way they urge. 
And in, like surge on surge. 

Headlong they burst ! 



Through dust and smoke and 

heat. 
Step by step, we retreat. 

Inch by inch given ; 
Then, deadliest of the whole, 
Some random volley's roll 
Warren's great martyr-soul 

Ushered to Heaven ! 

So Bunker Hill was won. 

And great deeds, that day done, 

World-wide grew known ; 
When victory was but shame. 
Defeat, eternal fame, 
And Time one blazing name 

Gained, all his own ! 



INTRODUCTION 

By The Honorable Frederic W. Lincoln, 

President of the Association. 



ORATION 
By The Honorable William Everett, LL.D. 



THE LOST CHORD. 

{Sir Arthur Stillivati.) 

Cornet, Organ, and Orchestra. 



BENEDICTION. 
By The Reverend Charles Babbidge, D.D. 



INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 

By henry H. EDES. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, — The Charter of the Bunker Hill 
Monument Association, signed by Governor Eustis on the 
seventh of June, 1823, declares the purpose of the incor- 
poration to be " the construction of a monument in Charles- 
town to perpetuate the memory of the early events of the 
American Revolution." The Association, however, has always 
felt that it also had other duties to perform. Accordingly, 
its Annual Meeting, on the anniversary of the Battle, is 
usually dignified by an Address of an historical or patriotic 
character. Upon several great occasions, the foremost orators 
of their time have been summoned to recount the story of the 
battle and the men of Bunker Hill. Webster and Everett, 
Devens and Winthrop have, in turn, held vast audiences spell- 
bound by their splendid periods ; and to-night, we are to enjoy 
the privilege of listening to a scholar, and an orator of the 
first rank, whose attainments in the field of letters have made 
him known in two continents and have earned for him the 
right to inscribe his name below that of Mr. Winthrop on 
that limited roll. 

It is a matter of deep regret to us all that the honored and 
revered Dr. Charles Babbidge is detained at his home in Pep- 
perell by the weight of years and bodily infirmities. For 
sixty-two years he has been the faithful and beloved minister 
of the church where Colonel Prescott worshipped and where 
four generations of his descendants have known the ministra- 
tions of the same saintly pastor. I do not forget that my part 

3 



18 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 

in the services of this evening should be brief, but I am sure 
that you would not excuse me if I omitted to read to you a 
part of a most interesting letter which has been received from 
Dr. Babbidge : — 

Pepperbll, Oct. 9th, 1 895, 

Dear Mk. Edes, — Each succeeding day makes it more and 
more evident that I am too old and enfeebled to appear in public 
again. I shall enter deeply into the spirit of the 14th ; but it can 
only be " in the spirit." 

The very name of Bunker Hill is, to me, a powerful stimulant. 
In our Pepperell Celebrations, I was, for many years, " The Stock 
Orator." In the earlier years of my figuring as the Bunker Hill 
orator, I had in my audience, fully a score of men who had taken 
a part in the battle. I had listened to their stories of the details 
of the battle ; and it is to me a matter of deep regret that I did 
not put on record many interesting facts that have now passed 
forever from our reach. 

Let me relate a little incident in which Bunker Hill is a promi- 
nent feature. As our regiment (the "Old Sixth"), was passing 
down Broadway, in New York City, at the opening of the rebel- 
lion, we halted for a moment in the midst of the thousands who 
filled the streets. At this moment, a gentleman approached me, 
mistaking me for one who held a much higher rank than that of 
a Chaplain, and asked me, from where the regiment had come. 
To simply reply, " from Middlesex County," would have been no 
reply at all. I therefore, to make the matter clear, answered, 
"Bunker Hill." Judge of my astonishment when, shortly after 
the war, I listened to a lecture by George William Curtis, deliv- 
ered at Nashua, N. H., in which, relating the little incident above 
narrated, he spoke of asking " a gray -bearded veteran of the regi- 
ment," where it had come from, and receiving the reply uttered 
in emphatic tones, " Bunker Hill." 

The joke of the thing consists in his mistaking me, a dapper 
youth of only fifty-four years, for an old soldier, a regular 
" vieux moustache." After the lecture I tried to make my way 
to the lecturer, in order to correct his mistake in regard to my 
personality, but the crowd of friends who surrounded him, made 
this impossible. But now ray marching days are all over ; and 
eighty-nine years have settled the question of my being a 
veteran. 



INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 19 

I have no apology to make for my prolixity. But there is one 
consideration that may afford you consolation. You will never 
again receive a letter from one who, like myself, played, in his 
childhood, in and out of the Eedoubt on Bunker Hill, while it 
still remained precisely as it was Avhen Prescott left it, and when 
Warren moistened it with his blood. 

Most respectfully, yours, 

Charles Babbidge. 

And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, it remains for me to 
vacate the Chair that it may be taken by a great-grandson 
of Paul Revere. I present to you, as the presiding officer of 
the evening, the President of the Bunker Hill Monument 
Association, the Honorable Frederic W. Lincoln. 



IKVOCATIOK. 

By the rev. dr. JOSEPH H. ALLEN. 

OLORD GOD, FATHER ALMIGHTY, who dost bestow 
upon thy chosen sons wisdom, understanding, and 
strength, that they may fitly guide, defend, and govern thy 
people ! 

We praise thee in the honored memory of our fathers, who 
with strong hands and valiant hearts laid the foundation of 
those liberties, which by their wise counsels are still protected 
and maintained ; 

We praise thee in the proud memory, brought to our hearts 
this day, of those who, though in defeat and pain, yet aided to 
win for their native land the far-off blessings of liberty and 
peace ; 

We praise thee in the living memory of those who in our 
own day, inspired by that high example, restored in our Com- 
monwealth and Nation the wavering faith in liberty and union, 
now and forever, one and inseparable ! 

Inspire us also, Lord our God, and build us up, that we 
may worthily enter upon the goodly heritage which we have 
received ; giving the service of our lives, and, if need be, the 
sacrifice of them, for whatsoever things are true, and honest, 
and just, and of good report. 

In one great faith and hope, in fellowship together as 
men, as citizens of no mean city, and as sons of the Living 
God whose service is perfect freedom, we offer this our 
prayer. Amen. 



ORATION. 



NOTE. 

In the preparation of the following address, I desire to 
express my obligations : first, to the History of Groton, by- 
Caleb Butler ; secondly, to the History of the Siege of Boston, 
by Hon. Richard Frothingham ; thirdly, to a MS. by Judge 
Prescott, seen and used by the latter writer, for a copy of 
which I am indebted to the very great kindness of His Honor 
Roger Wolcott, and of Linzee Prescott, Esq. ; (since the 
delivery of the address, I find Mr. Frothingham printed it 
in the Massachusetts Historical Society's Proceedings for 
1875 ;) fourthly, to Hon. Samuel A. Green, for xery im- 
portant corrections of errors into which I had inadvertently 
fallen. The American Archives of Peter Force and other 
familiar historical works have been consulted. 

W. E. 



ORATION. 



"\^ 7E have come to the end of that period of com- 
* memoration which recalled by solemn services 

the series of events that created and consolidated our 
existence as a nation. From 1874 to 1889, every 
year has had its own centennial anniversary. Boston 
Harbor, Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, the long line 
of ensuing battles, the Declaration of Independence, the 
formation of the Constitution, the first opening of the 
North West Territory have in turn received appropriate 
and grateful notice. And now, as our country's second 
century is rapidly following her first, one season after 
another marks the days when our fathers and founders 
themselves left the stage, and made way for their sons, 
who are already appearing as historic, nay almost 
legendary forms to us. I do not recall that any notice 
was taken in 1886 of the centenary of the death of 
Nathanael Greene, probably the greatest military 
genius of the Revolutionary War, second only to 
Washington in his influence on the great result, yet 
the very spot of whose burial is forgotten ; nor did I 
hear that in 1890 Philadelphia offered any special 
honors at the grave of Franklin. All the more does 
it seem right that this association should pay a suita- 
ble tribute to the hero of Bunker Hill, our own citizen 



26 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

soldier, the redoubted William Prescott, whose life of 
glory ended on the thirteenth of October, 1795. It 
is well to realize, by such commemoration, how com- 
pletely the days of our own infancy are over, and to 
draw from it the lesson what we are to do with the 
legacy of the fathers when a hundred years have rolled 
by since one of the bravest of them put off mortality 
when close on threescore and ten. 

It is a mistake to think of our age and its duties 
as though we had no past, and were entitled to begin 
the twentieth century as if just rescued from a deluge. 
We are told that Noah celebrated his deliverance from 
the ark by a new discovery ; but it further developed 
a new vice, unknown to the submerged centuries. 
Neither have we any right, when we commemorate 
the fathers, to fancy that they have prescribed our 
absolute pattern, and we have nothing to do but to 
go on repeating their operations forever. Over the 
2:rave of Prescott it is right to ask who and what he 
was in his time; and then what ought we to do as 
his descendants, who have so lately laid his great 
grandson and namesake to rest in the ancestral home 
of Pepperell. 

William Prescott was born in the ancient town of 
Groton. His family was originally derived from Lan- 
cashire, where the town of Prescot still exists in the 
heart of the manufacturing district. The Prescotts 
were among the earliest settlers of the frontier parts 
of Middlesex County, Lancaster, Sudbury, Concord, and 
later of Groton, all exposed to the fiercest incursions 
of the Indians. The first of the line was a blacksmith 
by trade, and acquired that honor which always attends 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 27 

his craft, as we are told by Longfellow in a poem that 
we shall find concerns our hero still more nearly.' He 
was a born fighter, and often engaged with the savages, 
at one time defending his house from their inroads 
with no other aid than his wife's, who loaded musket 
after musket for him to fire. He had brought with 
him from England a complete suit of mail, helmet, 
cuirass and gorget, with which he was wont to clothe 
himself in any contest with the Indians, and rendered 
as he thus was impenetrable to the heaviest blows of 
the tomahawk, was regarded by them as a supernatural 
being. His son Jonas transferred his father's trade 
from Lancaster to Groton, and rose to the first emi- 
nence in that venerable town, being captain in the 
militia, representative to the General Court, and en- 
trusted with every other position with which a New 
England democracy burdens those whom it professes 
to honor. A Greek city would not improbably have 
rewarded such services as Jonas Prescott's by exempt- 
ing him and his descendants forever from the payment 
of taxes ; but that is a pitch of gratitude to which the 
Athens of America and her sister boroughs have not 
yet climbed, as I am sure the Prescotts and Lawrences 
of Groton are thoroughly aware. 

Of Jonas Prescott's courtship a romantic story is 
told, how his sweetheart's parents in Sudbury steadily 
refused his suit, and locked his beloved Mary Loker in 
a room with a grated window. This harsh treatment 
did not shake the constancy of the lovers ; but Jonas, 
who one would suppose would have given a new illus- 
tration of Love's contempt of locksmiths by filing the 
bars of the dungeon as only a blacksmith could, pre- 



28 COL. WILLIAM PRE SCOTT. 

ferred to stand under the grating, to bide the pelting of 
a storm, talk to his beloved, and pray for better times. 
Mary Loker, still defying her parents' authority — no 
slight matter in the days before Philip's war — was 
sent by them, in a species of banishment, to what is 
now Sterling, then as remote and wild as the Adiron- 
dacks. Thither Jonas tracked her, and they were 
married in spite of all opposition, but so utterly with- 
out dowry or inheritance, that Mary's only washtub at 
first was the shell of a pumpkin. 

From this pair has sprung a large and distinguished 
progeny, of whom Mary lived to see one hundred and 
seventy five. Her youngest son was Benjamin Pres- 
cott, born two hundred years ago. He married the 
daughter of Thomas Oliver of Cambridge, a member of 
Governor Joseph Dudley's council, belonging to a 
family which was of unbroken distinction in the colo- 
nial and provincial days of Massachusetts, from the 
arrival of Cotton to the fall of Hutchinson, and far 
from obscure in later days. Benjamin Prescott was a 
man of remarkable bodily and mental energy and, like 
his father, of the first consideration in the town and 
the province. He was a member of the General Court 
for many years, a lieutenant-colonel in the militia, a 
justice in more than one tribunal, and finally was 
offered, but declined, the arduous post of representative 
in England of the Colony, which needed some one to 
plead its cause on boundary and other questions, where 
Governor Belcher had proved anything but an efiicient 
leader. 

Benjamin Prescott died in 1738. He had seven 
children, three of them sons, of whom James the eldest 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 29 

and Oliver the youngest son were both fully worthy 
of the high position to which their fathers had raised 
the name, standing out as leaders of men, both civil 
and military. Dr. Oliver Prescott is not yet forgotten, 
as one of the earliest members of the Massachusetts 
Medical Society, whose exertions have placed the phy- 
sicians of our state in the very highest rank of their 
noble profession, for courage, science and humanity. 

The sentiment of the American people, which in 
theory excludes all family considerations in the assign- 
ment of office, yet really takes a keen delight in study- 
ing history and biography through genealogy. The 
English magazines have lately contained several inter- 
esting articles on some of the great houses of England 
and Scotland. I commend the Prescotts to our best 
writers as affording a most noble and interesting theme 
for their pens. The illustrious scion of the stock whom 
we especially commemorate to-night was born on the 
twentieth of February 1726. He removed, while still 
under age, to a portion of his father's estate situated at 
a distance from the village of Groton, where he early 
followed the combative instinct of his race, by joining 
the military forces of the Colony, no child's play during 
the wars of the Austrian succession and the seven years. 
His name appears on a list of soldiers in the expedition 
to Louisbourg in 1746, and it has been thought that 
the intimate connection he then formed with Sir Wil- 
liam Pepperell caused him to suggest the name of 
Pepperell for Groton West Parish, when it was set off 
as a separate district in 1753. This is probable 
enough ; but the reputation of Sir William was such 
that it was almost inevitable, when two new districts 



30 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

were formed from Groton, that one should be named 
for him and the other for Governor Shirley, the com- 
mander in chief of his Majesty's American forces. 

There is no doubt also that William Prescott joined 
the expedition which removed the French colonists 
from Nova Scotia in 1755 ; an event which forms the 
theme of Mr. Longfellow's poem of " Evangeline," and 
had previously offered itself as a subject for romance to 
Hawthorne. 

It speaks volumes for the genius of our New England 
poet that his version of this exile, an occurrence that 
undoubtedly showed many sad and painful features, has 
been till lately accepted without question among us, as 
the story of an act of unmitigated oppression by Eng- 
lish tyrants on the most innocent and virtuous of man- 
kind. It seems to be supposed by some persons who 
are of pure English blood, and whose ancestors in 1755 
had no more notion of being anything but Englishmen 
than Washington had, that their independent station as 
Americans and friends of liberty is somehow strength- 
ened by convicting England of tyranny exercised upon 
persons of French descent, at a time when the govern- 
ment of France was the most corrupt and profligate, if 
not the most despotic in Europe. Such persons have 
not found out, what indeed Mr. Longfellow does not 
hint in " Evangeline," that every English army which 
marched to New France was full of provincials like 
Prescott, who were as keen to make war on the priest- 
ridden French as Braddock or Amherst or Loudoun or 
Wolfe ; that their chaplains. New England ministers of 
the deepest Puritan dye, looked upon every Nova 
Scotian as the bond-slave of the Roman Babylon j and 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 31 

that the officer who shut up the men of Grand Pre in 
the church, and announced their sentence of deporta- 
tion, was John Winslow of Marshfield, as pure a child 
of the Mayflower as any in the Plymouth County. 

We are apt to boast of our ancestors' part in the old 
French war. They shared in many of its skirmishes, 
sieges and battles in the long seven years from Wash- 
ington's trip to Venango down to the capture of Mon- 
treal, and the few occasions like the second siege of 
Louisbourg, where their help was not asked, were fol- 
lowed by them with the most sympathetic interest. 
The cold-blooded refusal of the Pennsylvania assembly 
to send aid to the Western counties met with no 
response from the eager sons of Massachusetts. But if 
we refuse to see our ancestors helping to send Evange- 
line and Gabriel out of Nova Scotia, we must shut 
them out of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, Oswego 
and Niagara, the Plains of Abraham and the Morro 
Castle. 

Poets are scarcely expected to keep to the strict facts 
of history in choosing striking themes for their verse. 
I do not know that any one is angry with Mr. Long- 
fellow for making Priscilla Mullins ride on a snow 
white steer a year before there had been any cattle 
brought over to Plymouth ; or Paul Revere complete 
his ride to Concord, when in point of fact he was cap- 
tured in Lincoln, and the news was carried on to Con- 
cord by our hero's kinsman, Samuel Prescott. But I 
must feel that he went beyond the bounds of legitimate 
adaptation when he so constructed his tale of the 
depopulation of Grand Pre as to paint its authors in 
the darkest colors, and yet suppress the fact that his 



32 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

own countrymen were the ones chiefly engaged in see- 
ing that orders were carried out. 

The accounts which Mr. Longfellow had at his com- 
mand in 1848 were imperfect. Since then the subject 
has been studied with a great wealth of original docu- 
ments, French as well as English, by our own illustri- 
ous historian, the lamented Francis Parkman.* He has 
placed it beyond a doubt, from the facts supplied by the 
French archives, that the Nova Scotians were treated 
by their English rulers with a kindness which surprised 
and annoyed the ministers of Lewis the Fifteenth, who 
were desirous of seeing them so oppressed as to make 
them revolt from a dominion which was just as law- 
fully established by treaty as our own over Nebraska 
or New Mexico. The priestly agents of France were 
constantly trying to stir up disaffection and prevent 
their late subjects from accepting peaceably the rule of 
King George ; a process the French thought utterly 
iniquitous when applied to their own conquests in 
Alsace or Lorraine ; the very priest of Grand Pre, 
whom Longfellow truly pictures as a devoted pastor, 
stands in history the object of reproach for confining 
himself to his spiritual duties, instead of turning into 
an agent of revolt. One tonsured conspirator, whose 
restless craft was the object of aversion to the high- 
spirited officers of King Lewis, went indeed beyond 
the duties of the altar; by his means two thousand 
Acadians were cajoled into leaving their homes and 
settling beyond the limits of Nova Scotia, with miser- 
able provision for their comfort, long before Winslow 
removed the inhabitants of Grand Pre and Annapolis. 

* See Montcalm and Wolfe, Vol. I. Chap. VIII. 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 33 

Moreover Mr. Parkman shows clearly that, whatever 
we may think of the scheme, its execution was not at 
all conducted with the hurry and cruelty pictured in 
the poem ; that as far as such a thing might be, Wins- 
low acted with humanity and consideration to those 
he was displacing; that the romantic exaltation of 
Acadians into Arcadians, indulged in by prose writers 
before and after Longfellow, has but little warrant in 
their actual lives, passed in a hard, cold, misty land, 
which their own beneficent native sovereigns affected 
to think it no hardship to leave. In a word, the entire 
occurrence, which is no better or worse than a score of 
others which owe their existence to the fiend of war, all 
whose children are tainted with his own corruption, has 
been exaggerated, weakened, distorted, perverted, in 
order to make out a case against Old England, in 
which whatever its lights and shades. New England 
had its full share. 

At the end of William Prescott's service in Canada, 
he was offered a commission in the royal forces, but 
declined. A soldier by race and temper, he was not 
one by profession, any more than thousands of his 
comrades in the two wars. It was at this time, — the 
years following the peace of 1763, — that a spirit of 
oppression, which might tend to alienate New England 
from Old England, arose in the British government. I 
believe the Declaration of Independence is not far 
wrong in charging on the King of Great Britain the 
wrongs of the colonists. The change in the policy 
towards America which in twenty years turned the 
Prescott and Washington of 1753, the Prescott of the 
Bay of Fundy and the Washington of the Monongahela, 



34 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

into the Prescott of Bunker Hill and the "Washington 
of Dorchester Heights, was simply that an old, expe- 
rienced, sensible king died, who had trusted his affairs 
for four years to the boldest and most generous spirit 
that ever governed a nation, and was succeeded by an 
obstinate, sullen youth who was determined to be the 
king that his mother urged him to be, and wished rather 
to have North govern by a corrupt parliament than 
Pitt rule through a sympathetic nation. From the very 
first speech George the Third delivered from the throne, 
nay, from the hour he knew of his grandfather's death, 
and ordered the groom who rode with him to assent to 
a falsehood, down to the day, forty seven years after- 
wards, when he used the cry of " No Popery " to rein- 
state a cabinet that had to put a strait jacket on him 
in three years George the Third is directly, personally, 
responsible for the alienation of the Colonies and the 
hostility of Ireland, not, as the fiction of English law 
says, because he was ill advised, but because his natural 
temper, which he never tried to tame, drew to him by 
a fatal magnetism just such advisers as would confirm 
his congenital faults. 

There were men in possession of his ear who might 
at least have made an effort to enlighten his stupid- 
ity and soften his obstinacy. When he asked support 
in his narrow and harsh suppressions of everything 
like independence in the colonies or at home, he found 
not a few counsellors whose brilliant talents, thorough 
training, and wide knowledge of men, while they in- 
sured the temporary triumph at least of every cause 
in which they enlisted, laid upon them all the heavier 
responsibility of choosing the right, and acting upon 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 35 

higher principles than love of office, and reverence for 
the King's power. Mansfield, North, Thurlow, Wed- 
derburn, even Lord George Germain, were men of far 
more than average talents; some of them were able 
to rise to the very highest posts purely by their own 
genius. They were wholly beyond the Weymouths, 
Suffolks and Hillsboroughs, puppets whom certain 
American historians have made prominent merely be- 
cause they happened to be officially at the head of 
colonial affairs. Yet these men yielded their mighty 
powers entirely to the King's orders, and devised 
methods with infernal ingenuity to keep Parliament 
deluded as to the true condition of America. Every 
one of them could have supplied every deficiency in 
the King's intellect if they had thought it for their in- 
terest, or even felt an inclination to tell the truth. But 
in every one of them there was a radical want of 
heart ; there was a want of that principle which guides 
the soul by a higher wisdom how to choose between 
two courses where the mere intellect stands perplexed. 
When I contrast the counsellors who confirmed the 
King in his obstinate attempt to coerce the Americans 
with those who would have led him to wiser, milder, 
and, as I am old-fashioned enough to say, more legal 
courses, — when I contrast Mansfield with Chatham, 
Thurlow with Camden, Wedderburn with Fox, North 
with Burke, and Sackville with Conway, — I seem like 
one who, in his journey from the low thickets that 
fringe the gulf at Vera Cruz, rises to the broad plateau 
that surrounds the walls of Mexico. You are still 
environed by the luxuriance of tropical nature, — the 
soil still sustains a gorgeous growth that transcends all 



36 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

one sees in less favored lands, — but you have left 
the dank and sickly jungles whose atmosphere is loaded 
with insidious poison, and where every noise suggests 
an envenomed reptile, — and you have ascended to 
the tempered fervor, the refreshing glow of the exalted 
plains where every breath is a delight, and the eye 
slowly climbs to the glittering summits of the tran- 
scendent peaks that lift it to the very gate of heaven. 

I shall not tell again the story of the sad steps 
whereby Massachusetts was driven in twelve years 
from devoted loyalty to armed resistance. Pepperell 
was in line with her sisters in protest against the 
tyranny of the ministry, and instructed her represen- 
tative James Prescott, a brother of William, to oppose 
a firm front to the proceedings of the royal officials. 
As soon as the summons to arms went through the 
Province, the men of Pepperell were in array. A 
regiment was formed in 1774, of which William Pres- 
cott was appointed Colonel, and on the morning of the 
nineteenth of April a messenger rode from Concord to 
Pepperell, arriving about ten o'clock. Colonel Prescott 
immediately ordered the Pepperell and Hollis compa- 
nies to march to Groton, whither he himself rode ahead 
to arouse the Groton company ; but his own neighbors, 
though five miles further back, had reached Groton 
under arms before their brethren of that place were 
ready to receive them, much to the chagrin of Dr. 
Oliver Prescott, who did not relish seeing his own men 
of old Groton outstripped by his brother's from the 
West district. The Colonel hastened on, with all of 
his regiment that he could muster, to Concord, and 
followed hard upon the track of the flying regulars. 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 37 

but did not succeed in overtaking them. He was en- 
listed, as were most of his men, for eight months, and 
the venerable Dr. Babbidge certifies that every able 
bodied man in Pepperell had followed his call. 

On the sixteenth of June a council of war was called 
in Cambridge by General Artemas Ward, commander 
in chief of the colonial troops, a noble historical name, 
perverted in meaning as in spelling by an amiable hu- 
morist, who one would think might have found a name 
for his showman without burlesquing the official pre- 
decessor of Washington. That council ordered a party 
drawn from the regiments of Prescott, Frye, and 
Knowlton, to occupy and fortify Bunker Hill, promis- 
ing them relief in the morning. This council was held 
in the ancient dwelling to the northwest of Harvard 
College, which in the next generation had the honor 
of shielding the birth and infancy of our beloved poet 
Dr. Holmes. In his childhood he often heard his 
mother tell of the tumultuous escape of her family 
from Charlestown under the fire of the next day, and 
the boy and the man loved the ancient house which 
was so doubly consecrated by the memories of Bunker 
Hill. That house, as far as either firmness or conven- 
ience went, might be standing, and ought to be stand- 
ing, at this hour. It is said that it was pulled down to 
satisfy the limited taste of a donor to Harvard College, 
who fancied the more imposing modern structure that 
he erected could be seen better if the lowly but vener- 
able house were away. It was a sacrilege ! The eye 
of any trained architect could see at once that the 
quaint and sturdy parsonage grouped in the truest 
artistic composition with its loftier neighbor ; and for 



38 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

its memories and associations, redolent of the most 
illustrious achievements and brightest names of New- 
England in war and peace, the Holmes House ought 
to be standing, though every lawyer in the country 
were driven to seek the training of his brains in the 
Temple, and every gymnast the exercise of his muscles 
on the treadmill — that is, the bicycle. 

From the green before that house the detachment 
set forth, blessed by the venerable President of Harvard 
College ; — and like most detachments sent forth under 
the blessing ol Harvard College, it fought valiantly 
and got beaten. It went to Charlestown under the 
command of Colonel Prescott ; under the command of 
Prescott it remained till the end of the fight ; and if 
Prescott had had his heart's desire, it would have 
returned the very next night and retaken the hill, 
which he had abandoned only for want of proper 
ordnance and ammunition. 

I do not propose to tell over again the story of 
Bunker Hill. It has been told repeatedly by one and 
another careful writer and eloquent speaker ; but by 
none more clearly, more thoroughly than by our late 
honored and beloved President, whose statue is just 
ready for erection ; honored in the court as in the 
field, that true heir of the patriots of 1776, General — 
Judge — Devens. 

He told the story on the centennial anniversary of 
the battle, not merely with the love and fervor of a 
loyal son of the spot, but with the appreciation of a 
soldier, as gallant as Warren, as energetic as Put- 
nam, as experienced as Gridley. When he recounted 
the various events of the night and day, the redoubt 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 39 

and the parapet, the rail fence and the stone wall, 
Bunker Hill and Breed's Hill, going through the specific 
part taken by regiments, by officers, by marksmen, 
he knew what he was talking about, as no previous 
historian or orator, Bancroft or Frothingham or Webster 
could possibly know it. He carried us in detail and 
yet by system through the entire engagement, from 
the original fortification under the eye of Gridley at 
midnight, to the breathless gathering on the Convent 
hill when twenty four hours had passed since the 
detachment left the College green. There is not a 
dart of a bayonet, not a leap of a cannon ball, not a 
wound or a death that missed his eye. He pointed 
out, what less instructed students might see, but what 
from a trained soldier like him became doubly histori- 
cal, that there was very little command on the day 
at all, — that citizen soldiers, assembled from various 
colonies, enlisted in many regiments, habitually taking 
orders, when they took any, from their own comman- 
ders, were not yet disciplined to move as one man 
at the word of their appointed superior ; and that 
much of the fighting on the seventeenth of June was 
rather that of concentrated guerillas than of organized 
troops. General Devens's oration did ample justice 
to all those veteran officers who gave their energy 
and their experience to marshal, to organize, to rally 
the ill-assorted army, — Gridley and Knowlton and 
Pomeroy and Stark and Putnam. He brought out, 
as none can help bringing out, the inspiration afforded 
by the presence of the hero and martyr "Warren. But 
he distinctly assigned the name of commander of the 
forces that constructed, that manned, that defended 



40 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

the redoubt to the last, to him whose death we this 
day commemorate, the experienced, the prudent, the 
fearless Prescott. 

"When General Devens ceased his centennial oration, 
the eyes of all his vast audience were turned to one 
of the most remarkable warriors ever produced by any 
country. There sat on the platform William Sherman, 
a general whose achievements, equalling in brilliancy 
and persistency those of any of our own earlier heroes, 
Greene or Morgan or Scott or Taylor, have set him 
second to none of the commanders in our civil war, 
Grant or McClellan or Thomas, and who has impressed 
himself even more emphatically on his countrymen as 
a man, — a character unique in its stalwart force, so 
as to require for itself a place apart from all compari- 
sons or periods whenever our history is written. On 
the seventeenth of June 1875, he rose at our President's 
call, and in a few straightforward, unadorned sentences, 
expressed what every descendant of the early founders 
of New England must feel on the soil of Bunker Hill, 
what every American feels on the battle ground where 
our independence was established, and then as a soldier 
pronounced his own independent opinion as to the 
honors of the battle. He gave all due credit to Warren 
and to Putnam ; but he said of Prescott that he was 
the commander, and that he was the only one who 
exercised the functions of a commander throughout 
the day. From that sentence, pronounced by such a 
soldier at such a time, there can be, there ought to be, 
no appeal. 

Nor did a different view prevail during the life 
time of Prescott. It was not till long after the death 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 41 

which this day commemorates that any serious attempt 
was made to reverse the judgment of General Heath, 
himself of the council of war at Cambridge, or to 
revive and strengthen the statement of the funeral 
eulogist of General Israel Putnam, who undoubtedly 
played a conspicuous part on the higher summit, and 
to invest him with the glory of command. 

General Putnam has always been a prominent figure 
in the eyes of his countrymen, for the part he took 
in the war of the Revolution. There is something 
about his sturdy, fiery temper, which seems the very 
type of the Yankee, who could play the three parts of 
farmer, legislator, and soldier in three days, to the 
equal and entire satisfaction of his own people. He 
was certainly prominent on the day of Bunker Hill ; 
he certainly held at that time the commission of 
Brigadier General in the extemporized army ; and it 
is perhaps not very strange that some of his old com- 
rades, coupling the two things fifty years later, should 
have made him out to have had the chief command. 
Yet I cannot avoid saying that those who cherish the 
fame of General Putnam seem to me to make a mistake 
in dwelling on his exploits at Bunker Hill or attempt- 
ing to weave from them an especial crown of laurel. 
Such orders as he did give, such contributions as he 
did make, seem to me to have shown more alacrity 
than judgment ; and if Prescott really were under his 
orders, he derived very little help and much embarrass- 
ment from his alleged superior. It is no very grateful 
duty to have to draw comparison between two men 
of tried valor and unquestioned patriotism. But the 
work that gave Bunker Hill the renown it bears ; the 



42 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

defence through the long day of the breastwork and 
the redoubt against reiterated attacks, one and another 
triumphantly repelled; the final dogged resistance up 
to the last possible moment ; the steady retreat at 
length, solely because Putnam and Putnam's superior 
had failed to furnish the needed ammunition, — this 
gallant, this glorious, this immortal work was achieved 
under the eye and by the command of William Prescott, 
and him alone. 

In a letter written to John Adams, about two months 
after the battle, responding to a request for a detailed 
account. Colonel Prescott gives a very concise but very 
clear statement, with a precision worthy of Julius 
Caesar, of the eventful day. He speaks of himself as 
directing the entire movement, and alludes to no other 
commander. He would have fought if possible more 
bravely than he did, if he had known that on the 
heights of Braintree, ten miles away, stood Abigail 
Adams with her son John Quincy, then eight years old, 
watching the smoke as it rose from Charlestown, and 
explaining to her boy what meant those distant fires. 

If there is any glory in that day, if, as at Thermopy- 
lae, the victor for the moment was the vanquished in 
the result ; if the shaft on the spot enshrines more 
memories, and awakens more emotions than the lion 
of Waterloo or the bridge of Lodi ; if Bunker Hill is 
as unalloyed a source of exultation as Dorchester or 
Trenton, as Saratoga or Yorktown, or alloyed by the 
loss of Warren alone, it is because we had on that day, 
commanding men unused to military orders, unwilling 
to do anything for a master, but ready to do all for 
a leader, one whose prudence, whose keenness, whose 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 43 

daring, whose endurance, and a nameless power to 
impress himself on his fellows, may rank him with 
the chiefest paladins of our war, with Allen or Mont- 
gomery, with Marion or Morgan, a Wayne without his 
rashness, and an Arnold without his treason. 

Colonel Prescott's service continued till the end of 
1776 ; his regiment formed part of the Continental 
army in the Campaign of New York, being posted at 
a critical point in the defence of the city, and with- 
drawn with a care which his son informs us received 
the special commendation of Washington. But after 
1776 we cease to hear of him in command of a regi- 
ment, though he appears as a volunteer in the campaign 
on the upper Hudson. His withdrawing from the field 
of arms seems to have been hastened by a serious 
injury, contracted in some of his farming operations at 
Pepperell. 

In the later years of his life, he was frequently 
elected to the General Court, and in the insurrection 
of 1786 was charged with its suppression in Middlesex 
County, where he appeared at Concord prepared for 
action. He was one of those characters which entirely 
apart from any acquired distinction are sure to be 
favorites in a New England village. Large, athletic, 
open in his look, generous in his temper, hearty and 
eager to listen to the call of friendship to an extent 
that injured his own fortune, he lived to the last loved 
and honored in his own town not merely for what he 
had done but for what he was, — a man who could not 
help charming all who knew him. 

He was early married to Abigail Hale, belonging to 
a family of whom I dare not say in this presence what 



44 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

New England owes to them. It must have struck 
William Prescott with peculiar horror, when the news 
came to him during the anxious occupation of New 
York, that the young adventurer from his gallant com- 
rade Knowlton's regiment, whom Howe had executed 
with every circumstance of insult, bore the name and 
perhaps the blood of his absent wife. She was one of 
those remarkable New England matrons who loved to 
exercise their minds over the most tremendous problems 
of the relations between God and man, a friend and 
correspondent of Jonathan Edwards ; a victim, too, of 
that feeble health which for so many generations was 
the lot of New England's wives and mothers, before 
they understood that it is better to live for one's dear 
fathers, brothers, and sons than to die for them by 
inches, freezing and starving one's self to keep them 
fed and clothed. Yet neither her Calvinism nor her 
sickness prevented her ruling her household by love, 
watching over and guiding her beloved son far into his 
maturity and surviving her husband eighteen years. 

That son was Judge William Prescott of Salem and 
afterwards of Boston. Although he has now been dead 
more than half a century, there have hardly died out 
of our atmosphere the echoes of that peculiar strain of 
respect in which his equals always spoke of him. I 
never saw him in the flesh ; but from the tone in which 
I have always heard his name mentioned, I seem to 
realize how an earlier generation must have talked 
and thought of John Jay. He was offered by General 
Washington the position of confidential secretary, and, 
declining it for himself, recommended instead his friend 
and classmate Col. Tobias Lear, who won, as history 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 45 

abundantly shows, the strongest attachment of our 
sainted leader. 

Judge Prescott was a member of that remarkable 
assembly, which has become to our Southern brethren 
a name of legendary horror, the Hartford Convention. 
We have his own emphatic testimony, — and a truer 
man never spoke, — that nothing was farther from the 
thoughts of that gathering of grave and acute men 
than a dissolution of the Union, or anything that even 
looked in that direction. 

In naming him no Boston speaker must ever omit 
to name his revered wife, who went about our streets 
on errands of good so constantly, that no one ever 
thought of her without a benediction, before the days 
when fussy organizations had squeezed half the heart 
out of practical charity. 

About thirty six years ago, William Hickling Pres- 
cott, the son of William and Catherine, the grandson of 
William and Abigail, followed his ancestors to the 
grave. If the present generation, enslaved by those 
it fancies to be more scientific or more philosophical 
historians, is tiring of the simple and dignified contri- 
butions of Prescott to history, — if the charm of his 
social intercourse, always confined to a select few, is 
now even less than a memory, at least Americans never 
can afford to forget the matchless example he sets them 
of devotion to duty for duty's sake. 

Mr. Prescott was born to an independent fortune, 
which entirely exempted him from all necessity for 
work ; he was in the centre of interests, domestic and 
social, which might easily and naturally have occupied 
his time with the full consent of all who knew him ; 



46 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

and an accident in early youth had reduced his sight to 
a condition which might well be considered to excuse 
any man from laboring beyond the direst necessity. 
His disposition was to indolence and self-indulgence, 
though his natural tastes were far too pure and elevated 
for that latter word to become one of reproach. But 
before every thing else he was a Christian ; and a 
Christian of that type that will not allow any authority 
but conscience to determine the meaning of the Parable 
of the Talents. He thought that idleness was a sin, at 
least for himself, for he was not one to prescribe duties 
to others. He deliberately laid out for himself a task 
of historical writing, which might have shaken many a 
stouter frame and appalled many a hardier spirit. He 
gathered round him a mass of original material of por- 
tentous size and cost ; " starving in the midst of 
plenty," his feeble eyes had to wait till he had trained 
a secretary to unfold its stores to him ; he listened, he 
compared, he judged, he noted, at length he wrote ; yet 
all so purely from a sense of duty, that when his first 
work was done, he was only induced to publish it by 
the solicitations of Mr. Sparks, a brother historian, and 
as staunch a friend as ever lived, for he must have seen 
that the fascination of Mr. Prescott's work would far 
eclipse his own. He attained to a fame of which he 
had never dreamed ; he set the glory of American liter- 
ature at home and abroad on a height from which it 
never can descend. Yet not a cloud of vanity or con- 
ceit ever passed over the spotless mirror of his soul ; 
for he had performed his work because he thought he 
ought to, with a courage as ardent, and a determina- 
tion as firm, as those which had armed his ancestor on 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 47 

Bunker Hill in the teeth of obstacles not more for- 
midable to the soldier than were those which he encoun- 
tered to the all but sightless scholar. If we have 
preached for a century to our young men that love of 
Right and Country and God could so tame the fiery 
spirit of Washington as to give him the air of cold 
dignity, let us tell them that two generations after 
Washington there passed from earth a worker from 
whom wealth and indolence and blindness could not 
withhold the crown of patient and triumphant 
industry. 

And now, fellow citizens, having paid our tribute to 
the memory of that great name to whom the thirteenth 
of October belongs, let us shortly reflect on the lesson 
which its centennial day brings to us. I need not tell 
you that a century ago the United States had sunk for 
the third time into a despondency almost equal to those 
of 1778 and 1786. Washington had indeed been re- 
elected, but he had already become the mark of insults 
and cabals as wretched as those of Lee or Conway. 
The burst of patriotic enthusiasm which had hailed the 
new Constitution, recalling even the days of Bunker 
Hill, had degenerated into its hateful and detestable 
travesty, the spirit of party ; party, — that supposed 
necessity of " practical politics," which is really a lum- 
bering, antiquated and unpractical method of enabling 
a free people not to do it. 

Distracted by every element of faction at home, our 
country could hardly see a bright spot in the outside 
heaven. The Indian tribes, France, Spain, England, 
were all indicating a clear conviction that the ruin of 



48 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

the infant country was a question of time, and that the 
year 1800 would see the sixteen states broken up and 
recombined at the will of their enemies. There was 
everything to discourage and nothing to cheer. 

What our country has done since 1795 is known to 
the world. Our territories, which then appeared too 
large for any possible control, have expanded till the 
continent seems too narrow for our ambition. Our 
population has spread over them in haughty triumph, 
developing, as fast as it spreads, the untold treasures of 
field and forest and mine ; we have trampled the 
savage tribes beneath our feet, exterminating them like 
the very wolves and panthers ; cities, outshining the 
Babylon that saw the death of Alexander, have sprung 
up on plains and harbors unknown to Columbus, and 
almost to Washington himself. In this development, 
we have armed ourselves with scientific and mechanical 
enginery, utterly unknown to former ages, and much of 
it of our own invention. The republican principles of 
government, with which we began our national life, 
have never for an hour been abandoned, but the Con- 
stitution and the Union have been maintained through- 
out our vast land; the hopes which such institutions 
awaken have attracted from other lands portentous 
numbers of immigrants ; yet the original stock which 
elected Washington to the Presidency has contrived to 
absorb and assimilate all these, giving birth to a 
nationality singularly individual, yet unmistakably the 
heir of its original elements. This new people has 
stood up in the face of its sister nations, exhibiting 
every quality which is needed for the loftiest and most 
imperial position, showing a mastery of commerce and 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 49 

diplomacy, and a capacity, if called upon, for the hard- 
est tasks of war. With all these cares upon us, we 
have instituted education, in all its branches, from the 
highest to the lowest ; we have made domestic comfort 
and luxury the possession of the many and not of the 
few ; we have asserted ourselves as masters in science 
and literature, and are eagerly assailing the citadels 
where are locked the trophies of decorative art ; we 
have succeeded, after struggles of Titanic proportions, 
in eradicating the foulest weed that was choking the 
fairer growth of our soil ; yet the religion which came 
to us with our very being we have never renounced, 
and although the bold spirit of a young nation re- 
fuses to submit to the dogmatism of older and quieter 
lands, our whole people makes solemn holiday, every 
year attended with greater manifestations of respect 
and love, of the day named for the Savior of Mankind, 

If it seems to you that I have stated these points in 
our national progress somewhat coldly, it is not that 
my own heart does not swell with pride to recount my 
country's glories, but because her praises are sounded 
every day loudly and arrogantly enough by thousands 
of ardent children, who think patriotism consists in 
seeing only what is glorious in our country's history 
and exaggerating it into the bargain ; who adopt the 
infernal sentiment, originally, I believe, proclaimed by 
Stephen Decatur, " Our country, may she always be 
in the right; but, right or wrong, may she always be 
victorious," subsequently abridged into " Our country, 
right or wrong"; — a sentiment worthy of one who 
sacrificed his genius and his laurels to the Moloch of 
duelling. 



50 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

The very love we bear to our country, the very pride 
we take in her success, the very conviction we enter- 
tain that there is no crown of national honor not 
within our reach, should lead us to accept nothing but 
perfection ; to acknowledge and note her shortcomings 
with the determination that they shall be corrected, as 
they can be, and the motto of every true patriot be 
Caesar's, 

" Think nothing done, while aught remains to do." 

We are not content with merely repeating, even on 
a grander scale, the same kind of successes that shine 
in earlier history ; we claim to have done better as well 
as more than former nations; and in many ways we 
have done so. Let us then, with sad allegiance to 
truth, also record that in our dealings with the native 
tribes we have combined cruelties worthy of Cortez or 
Pizarro with a refined dishonesty all our own ; that we 
have allowed party spirit, against which Washington 
solemnly warned us,* and which Jackson called a 
monster,! so to dominate our counsels as to threaten 
the Union itself, and to extirpate slavery only by call- 
ing to aid its sister fiend of war ; that the iron roads 
wherewith we have belted the continent have had their 
tracks laid not so much upon wood or iron as upon 
the patrimony of orphans and the wages of laborers, 
their engines fed with fraud for fuel and corruption 
for water ; that we have alternately flattered and 
insulted the emigrants who have flocked to our shores, 
till more than one of our great cities hold a population 

* Farewell Address ; Works, Vol. XII. pp. 225, 226. 
t Letter to Monroe, in Life, by Parton, II. 361. 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 51 

more menacing to the legacy of our fathers than would 
be the mobs of Naples and Constantinople. 

These blots on our escutcheon I would not name if I 
did not feel that the conscience of the nation is already 
aroused for their removal, and did I not believe that 
there is already stirring among us a higher public 
morality, which is not going to be satisfied with such 
ethics as satisfied Themistocles or Cicero or Walpole or 
Guizot, or even Hamilton and Jefferson, but is deter- 
mined to have America clean to her heart's core, the 
first of nations in gentleness and honesty, as in wealth 
and power. To this end it behoves every citizen to be 
at work. 

I propose therefore to take this occasion to warn you 
of a danger which I believe besets us at this time, — 
where our country has not advanced as far as she ought 
in a century, — and where sentiments which ought to 
be relegated with idolatry and slavery to the rusty 
museums of barbarism are repeated and cherished as 
if they were the essence of patriotism. 

In the year that William Prescott died, the whole 
country was agitated by the discussion of the treaty 
with Great Britain, just negotiated by John Jay. That 
treaty put an end at once to a score of questions left 
unsettled by that of 1783 ; it placed us in possession 
of our frontier forts ; it extended our commerce ; above 
all, it gave us peace with England at a time when we 
were actually overshadowed by the cloud of coming 
war with France, which burst into a shower of hostili- 
ties in a year or two. It was true that it left unsettled 
many points of contention, points that in seventeen 
years we went to war about and left unsettled after 



52 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

nearly three years' fighting ; points that never have 
been formally settled to this day, but have been worn 
out by the progress of humanity. But it was assailed 
as if it had given back the Union to King George, and 
asked for a British regiment to be quartered in Phila- 
delphia. The passion of wrath and ignorance and 
malice that blazed forth in city after city, beginning 
with Boston, and spread to state after state, sparing 
not even Washington in its fury, vented itself with 
peculiar virulence on John Jay, the author of the 
treaty. Yet if there is a historical fact beyond dispute, 
it is that John Jay could do no wrong; that his 
wisdom, his love of country, his Christian virtue never 
failed or even faltered in a single action of his entire 
life. In his treaty, so far from betraying or even 
jeoparding his country's honor, he had risen to a 
height of patriotic foresight far beyond even wise and 
good men in his own day, by recognizing and acting on 
the grand principle that peace is in itself a good thing, 
that war is in itself a bad thing, and that rumors of 
wars are worst of all. 

Since then our country has had some wars and many 
treaties. It has proved, what needed no proof, that 
the sons of the Pilgrims and the Hollanders, the Scotch- 
Irish and the Huguenots, can suffer and dare anything 
that the war god lays upon or before his votaries. We 
have had every laurel that the victor weaves with 
bloody hand decking the brow of our soldiers and 
sailors. Every story and every incident of siege and 
camp and line and squadron that can make the eyes 
glow and the lips part and the heart beat has been 
repeated again and again in our Iliad and Odyssey of 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 53 

battles and wanderings. "We have heard the brays 
and screams of the spirit-stirring drum, the ear- 
piercing fife, and those mortal engines whose rude 
throats counterfeit the thunders of immortal Jove ; 
we have had our eyes dazzled and our ears stunned 
with all the pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious 
war. 

We have enjoyed to the full all its coincident and 
inevitable wrongs ; the waste, the blunders, the corrup- 
tions, the jealousies, the intrigues, — the ravaged fields, 
the blazing villages, the stifling prisons, the deadly 
camps, the sickly sieges, the desolate homes, the widows 
and the orphans pining for husbands and fathers ; we 
have seen the war demon claiming as his prey the very 
sons who just because they were the bravest of the 
brave in the field, would have been the truest of the 
true in the court and the senate ; we have seen our 
Warrens, our Montgomerys, our Mercers, and our 
Pulaskis lost to us never to return, and our Arnolds, 
our Lees, our Gateses, our Conways spared to ruin us 
by treachery or stupidity. And, at last, when fighting 
has stopped, and what we call peace has come, because 
one or both belligerents are exhausted, there have 
remained the rankling sores, the unsated passions, 
fiends that it was so easy to raise by one blast of a 
trumpet, but that will not be laid by a generation of 
laborious incantation. 

How much we have gained by treaties, by deter- 
mining that whatever the points of difference with 
other lands, we will not, must not go to war, I could 
not tell you in a week. In actual land and treasure 
we have gained much ; in the very prestige and 



64 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

national honor which war is held to establish, we have 
gained scarcely less by the victories of peace ; but we 
have gained most of all, every time that we have 
made a peaceful settlement, however little it satisfied 
our proud demands, by the very fact that it was peace 
and not war, that there had been one more conquest 
over the uncouth and hateful idol of battles, whom the 
great bard of battles denounced by the lips of the 
Supreme Father, — 

"Of all the gods that tread the spangled skies 
Thou most unjust, most odious in our eyes! " 

And yet there are men among us now, who after a 
century from Jay's treaty, talk as the fire-eaters of that 
day talked. They want war ; they want it for national 
honor ; they want it that America may show she is 
not afraid ; that the United States are all ready and 
eager to copy the older nations of the world, which 
they are constantly boasting to have surpassed and 
outstripped, in the old barbaric, classic, mediaeval, 
expensive, stupid, wicked business of blows and wounds 
and slaughter, and all the wasteful, hideous horrors of 
conflict ; that we have no better, no higher means of 
winning the respect of foreign lands than were known 
to the endless list of conquerors during four thou- 
sand, rather let us say forty thousand years of human 
suffering, from Sesostris to Von Moltke, repeating the 
same sort of operations with a little more ghastly 
accuracy in killing. The United States, the land of 
invention, of progress, of Christian Endeavor, of count- 
less philanthropic movements, has no better method 
to offer for the development of youth, than the exten- 
sion of military drill, as the best means of teaching 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 55 

obedience and order, in case we ever have another 
war ! 

In case we ever have another war ! Can it be that 
Americans will coolly start that supposition, not as a 
horrible remote possibility, a second Chicago conflagra- 
tion or St. Bartholomew massacre, but as a not unlikely 
event ? It would seem as if they did, by the way they 
catch hold of every rumor, invented out of the whole 
cloth by sensational correspondents, that somebody 
somewhere is going to do something which the United 
States would not exactly like ; though in fact it would 
be none of our business if it were true. 

Such men are very eager to enforce by arms the 
Monroe doctrine, which declares that the United States 
cannot consent to have any part of the American 
continent brought into the system of the European 
sovereigns. Do we wish by our own act to bring our- 
selves into that system ? Do we wish to emulate the 
enormous armies, the colossal squadrons, the Titanic 
expenditures, the portentous taxation which is fast 
driving the new born Italy, lately the hope of the 
world, into bankruptcy, and keeping all the other 
glorious nations of Europe in one endless state of 
distrust and jealousy ; endless, that is, until some 
nation, wiser and more progressive than her sisters, 
shall begin the process of disarming, and show, what 
is generally the case, that the highest ideal morality 
is the purest practical common sense ? 

I appeal to those before me who know what war is. 
There are not a few here who gave themselves up, 
when their country called, to the hardships and dangers 
of a service, as exhausting as the wars of Napoleon or 



56 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

Frederic. You know what the word "war" means. 
The laurels that have been heaped upon you by your 
fellow citizens have not blinded your eyes or weakened 
your judgment ; and I know you feel with me that of 
all things to be deprecated, avoided, abhorred by this 
country, a foreign war would be the worst ; another 
civil war we will not even think of. 

0, if half the energy that is displayed in inventing 
infernal machines to destroy each other were turned 
to invent new modes of peace and conciliation, what 
might not be effected ! Such achievements belong to 
the very highest development of intellect and character. 
In December, 1861, the action of Commodore Wilkes 
in taking the Confederate commissioners out of the 
Trent had almost fanned into a flame the enmity of 
many persons in England to America. The insolent 
and flippant statesman who then governed her, while 
too astute to lead the countries into war, would 
have been very willing to tease them into it. He 
addressed a despatch demanding the surrender of the 
Commissioners in terms that if transmitted to Wash- 
ington would in all probability have caused its rejection 
as an insult, with what consequences I hardly dare to 
imagine. The despatch went for approval to Windsor 
Castle, and there Prince Albert, with no constitutional 
authority, but with a wisdom and a humanity above 
all praise, himself softened the ferocious demand till 
it became one that America might grant with dignity. 
He died in a few days, having led his self-suppressing 
life utterly unknown and misunderstood, nay disliked 
and laughed at by the nation ; but his last public act 
had saved his country and ours from war, — had in 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 57 

fact enabled us to save our Union ; and his stainless 
soul took its premature flight under our Lord's promise 
that " the peacemakers are blessed, for they shall be 
called the children of God." 

Do you tell me that such sentiments, whatever their 
intrinsic value, are out of place in a commemoration 
of Bunker Hill ? That question has been settled before. 
It was settled when Mr. Webster was the orator at 
the completion of our monument. You know it has 
often been held that the first indications of the Ameri- 
can revolution were given when Samuel Adams, in his 
Master's address at Harvard College, asserted the right 
of the governed to resist their governors in cases of 
tyranny. This was in 1743. In almost exactly a 
century, Mr. Webster delivered his memorable oration. 
He had just risked his popularity with the entire 
country by concluding the extradition and boundary 
treaties with England, for which he was equally abused 
by General Cass and Lord Palmerston. I hold that 
act of his showed what a mighty advance we had made 
in a hundred years, — that if the words of Samuel 
Adams in 1743 paved the way for American Indepen- 
dence of England, the work of Daniel Webster in 1843 
paved the way for eternal friendship between the 
former subject and the former mistress. Such was the 
view of our centennial orator. Judge Devens, as fear- 
less a soldier as ever lived, who prayed as follows on 
the seventeenth of June, 1875 : 

" Peace forever with the great country from which the day 
we commemorate did so much rudely to dissever us ! If there 
were in that time, or if there have been since, many things 
which we could have wished otherwise, we can easily afford to 
let them pass into oblivion." (^Author^s Edition, p. 50.) 



58 COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT. 

This very fourteenth of October might lead us to 
pause before we let the blaze of military glory dazzle 
us out of the contemplation of purer lights. On the 
fourteenth of October, 1066, William of Normandy slew 
the noble-hearted Harold, and for a time buried the 
ancient liberties of England. Their vitality was too 
strong not to rise again when a century and a half 
had gone away. But the battle of Hastings fastened 
upon the island that Norman military aristocracy, 
whose privileges have been handed down from noble 
to noble for twenty five generations, and the wisest 
heads in England are bewildered at the difficulties in 
the way of their removal. And yet there are Amer- 
icans who would go back to emulate that feudal con- 
queror, and create a soldier caste in this land. 

Let such, let all of us, listen to the yet holier and 
more touching call which the day of Bunker Hill and 
the name of Prescott give us, to sheathe the sword 
between rival nations, and exhibit it only as an antique 
trophy. While William Prescott was directing the 
shots on Bunker Hill, John Linzee was delivering the 
broadsides of the " Falcon " against the redoubt. In 
fifty years the grandson of Prescott and the grand- 
daughter of Linzee were married, and their posterity 
is still with us, full of promise. There hung in the 
library of the historian, there hang now in the library 
of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the swords 
that Prescott and Linzee wore on that day, crossed 
not in strife, but in peaceful symmetry. There may 
they hang forever, as a symbol that the softening of 
the rough ages, by the disuse of wars, is not the mere 
vision of a heathen poet, but indeed the veritable song 



ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT. 59 

brought down from heaven by the angels ; there may 
they hang forever, — or rather, if ever evil passions on 
either side of the ocean seek to drive us into the sin and 
crime of war, let them be transferred to the Department 
of State at Washington, where those who conduct the 
diplomacy of the United States, looking at them upon 
the wall, and through the window upon the monument 
of the Father of his country, may feel their spirits chas- 
tened and their souls raised from the low swamp of bat- 
tle to the soaring heights of peace. Then let the war 
god sink into the embrace of all conquering love, and 
let the genius of peace throw over their limbs the 
resistless network of the arts, that all the gods of 
Olympus may come and behold the spectacle of men's 
claims yielding to their duties, and Moloch prostrated 
before Jesus. 



LETTERS. 



[Many letters of regret were received by the Committee of Arrangements 
A few of these letters are here printed.] 

Department op State, 
Washington, October 1, 1895, 
Henry H. Edes, Esq. 

Chairman Committee of Arrangements, 

28 State Street, Boston, Mass. 

My dear Sir, — I take pleasure in acknowledging the invi- 
tation of the Bunker Hill Monument Association to be present 
on the 14th of October, at a service to be held in Boston in 
commemoration of Colonel William Prescott, Commander of 
the American forces in the redoubt at Bunker Hill. 

I highly appreciate the compliment conveyed by the invita- 
tion of the Association as well as the flattering terms in which 
you chose to give expression to it. I regret, nevertheless, that 
I shall be unable to be in Massachusetts on the day named. I 
remain, Yery truly yours, 

Richard Olney. 



Post Office Department, 
Office op Postmaster General, 
Wasuington, D. C, October 3rd, 1895. 
Henry H. Edes, Esq., Chairman, etc., 

28 State Street, Boston, Mass. 

My dear Sir, — I have the honor to acknowledge the invi- 
tation which you so kindly extend to me, in the name of the 
Bunker Hill Monument Association, to attend its proposed 



62 LETTERS. 

commemoration on the 14tli of October of the services of 
Col. William Prescott, commander of the American forces in 
the redoubt of Bunker Hill. 

It would give me great pleasure, as an American citizen, 
to participate in this memorial service, and especially to be 
privileged to listen to the oration of Dr. Everett. I regret, 
however, that the pressure of public business will not permit 
my leaving Washington at that time. 

With most cordial thanks for the invitation, and for the 
courteous words in which you communicate it, I am, dear sir, 
Very sincerely yours, 

Wm. L. Wilson. 



United States Courts, 
Boston, October 7, 1895. 

Dear Sir, — The necessity of being in Washington on the 
fourteenth makes it impossible for me to accept the courteous 
invitation of the Bunker Hill Monument Association to attend 
its services on that day, to my great regret. 
Truly yours, 

Horace Gray. 

Mr. Henkt H. Edes. 



United States Senate, 
Worcester, Mass., October 7, 1895. 

Dear Mr. Edes, — I am afraid it will be utterly impossible 
for me to attend the services in commemoration of Colonel 
Prescott. It will be a delightful occasion, and I am exceed- 
ingly tempted by it. But my time is otherwise pledged. 
I am faithfully yours, 

Geo. F. Hoar. 

Henry H. Edes, Esq. 



LETTERS. 63 

Groton, October 10, 1895. 

My dear Sir, — I very much regret my inability to be 
present at the service to be held Monday evening, the 14th 
instant, in commemoration of Colonel William Prescott. 

Colonel Prescott was born in Groton, and the inhabitants 
of the town have never failed to feel an interest when due 
honors have been paid to his memory. 

Very truly, Geo. S. Boutwell. 

To Henry H. Edes, Esq., Boston. 



Boston, October 7, 1895. 
Mr. Henry H. Edes, 

28 State Street, Boston, Mass. 

Dear Sir, — I have received the kind invitation from the 
Bunker Hill Monument Association, to attend the service in 
commemoration of Col. William Prescott, on Monday evening, 
October 14th. 

I am greatly disappointed to say that a prior engagement 
made for that night, makes it impossible for me to be present. 
I regret this extremely, as I should very much enjoy hearing 
the oration of Dr. Everett. 

Yours very truly, Wm. E. Russell. 



Williams College, 
WiLLiAMSTOWN, Mass., Octobcr 7, 1895. 

My dear Sir, — I am in receipt of the invitation of the 
Bunker Hill Monument Association Committee to be present 
at the service in commemoration of Colonel William Prescott 
on Monday evening the 14th inst. 

I am extremely sorry that it will not be possible for me to 
be present. Please accept my cordial thanks for your invita- 
tion and my assurance of the pleasure it gives me to know 
that such a service is to be held. 

Very sincerely yours, 

Franklin Carter. 

Henry H. Edes, Esq. 



64 LETTERS. 

Professor Xorton greatly regrets that a positive engage- 
ment for Monday evening, the 14th inst., deprives him of the 
pleasure of accepting the invitation, with which he has been 
honored by the Bunker Hill Monument Association, to be 
present at the service iu commemoration of Col. William 
Prescott. 

Cambridge, 7 October, 1895. 



Mr. John Lee Carroll regrets very much that imperative 
engagements will prevent his acceptance of the cordial invi- 
tation to attend the service in commemoration of Col. William 
Prescott, on Monday evening the 14th inst. 

The ^Iasoe, October "th. 



!MlLITABT OeDER OF THE LOTAL LeGIOK OF THE UxiTED StATES 

Commaxdeet-in-Ch IE F. 

Madison, Wisconsin, October 10, 1895. 

Dear Sir, — I regret very much that I cannot accept your 
kind invitation to the service in commemoration of Colonel 
William Prescott on the 14th inst., and thank you heartily 
for thus remembering me. 

T shall be in Washington on that day to attend the Annual 
session of the Loyal Legion. 

I am, dear Sir, 

Respectfully yours, 

Lucius Faiechild. 

To Henrt H. Edes, Esq. 

Boston, Mass. 



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